My Final Garden Tour

2025 is coming to a close, and this is my final garden tour of the year. This has been both the best gardening year and worst gardening year of my life, and despite the deeply positive personal growth I’ve achieved, I’ve never been this worried. Join me on this vegetable garden tour and life update where we discuss this year’s successes and failures, insane food inflation, the current health crisis, benefits of food storage, what we can learn from past generations of smart people and my plans for the 2026 gardening season.

How To Make Pickles At Home: https://youtu.be/1PHzDBPBqvI?si=VAms3aMQYyJY_R1p

I use the following products* most often for vegetable gardening and storing food:
Water Bath Canning Kit: https://amzlink.to/az03DT5HZyq6f
Mason Jars (16oz): https://amzlink.to/az0ILBOCH38YH
Mason Jars (32oz): https://amzlink.to/az0tAGZrvCz5x
Mason Jars (64oz): https://amzlink.to/az0i5b36MSoac
Canning Lids (Regular): https://amzlink.to/az05Vgzj8Jqlj
Canning Lids (Wide): https://amzlink.to/az0Eb8l6TTrWd
Leak-Proof Screw Lids (Regular): https://amzlink.to/az0PqYqkPHaXP
Leak-Proof Screw Lids (Wide): https://amzlink.to/az02oVHg7B4iR
Canning Funnel: https://amzlink.to/az0ntl7P8qJRE
Grow Bags (Black): https://amzlink.to/az0UDaVzkSLWi
Grow Bags (Tan): https://amzlink.to/az02kBaExY5sL
True Organic All Purpose Fertilizer [5-4-5] (4lb): https://amzlink.to/az0hjJZgpjzCe
Alaska Fish Fertilizer [5-1-1] (Gallon): https://amzlink.to/az0Jhw8liNoe3
Azomite Trace Minerals (44lb): https://amzlink.to/az0qPn4i34Eol
Espoma PlantTone Fertilizer [5-3-3] (36lb): https://amzlink.to/az0bzdsuXPHMZ
Espoma PlantTone Fertilizer [5-3-3] (50lb): https://amzlink.to/az0dh0dYaye1l
Espoma Bone Meal (10lb): https://amzlink.to/az0KAuCOZcPgQ
Jack’s All Purpose [20-20-20] (1.5lb): https://amzlink.to/az0JG0Dv6Da0h
Jack’s All Purpose [20-20-20] (25lb): https://amzlink.to/az0F6FgxdhKjO
Thicker Row Cover, 1.5oz/yd, 10x30FT: https://amzlink.to/az09JmFkSWHQS
Insect Netting (White): https://amzlink.to/az0H5tKMYxP2O
Insect Netting (Black): https://amzlink.to/az0ymrpHnIeJ2
Shade Cloth: https://amzlink.to/az01boLJy9JNI
PVC Clamps (1/2 in): https://amzlink.to/az0trVANmCYcX
Pruning Snips: https://amzlink.to/az0S6BULZGPmi
Watering Wand: https://amzlink.to/az0O3ZfEhftZ8
Weed Barrier: https://amzlink.to/az0FMvvMdjto9
Full Amazon Store: https://amzlink.to/az0yli4Cz0iXX

TABLE OF CONTENTS
0:00 My Final Garden Update And Tour
1:02 Why My Garden Struggled This Year
3:31 My Family Trip To Italy
5:08 Food Inflation, Healthcare Costs
6:52 Harvesting Peppers & Our Changing Culture
9:50 Harvesting Tomatoes & Grocery Stores
11:11 We Changed The Grocery Store Model
13:50 Hot Peppers, Decentralized VS Centralized Food
15:29 Possums, Persimmons And Consolidation
18:39 Pruning Trees, Instant Gratification
20:07 More Tree Pruning, Higher Healthcare Costs
21:15 More Gardening, Less Body Weight
22:33 Saving Money By Gardening And Storing Food
24:20 How I Save Money On Groceries
25:53 Robotic Decision Making VS Deliberate Investing
30:13 Adventures With Dale

If you have any questions about how to save money by gardening and storing food, want to learn more about growing fruit trees or the things I grow in my raised bed vegetable garden and edible landscaping food forest, are looking for more gardening tips and tricks and garden hacks, have questions about vegetable gardening and organic gardening in general, or want to share some DIY and “how to” garden tips and gardening hacks of your own, please ask in the Comments below!

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MY WEBSITE
https://www.themillennialgardener.com/

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VISIT MY AMAZON STORE FOR PRODUCTS I USE MOST OFTEN IN MY GARDEN*
https://amzlink.to/az0yli4Cz0iXX

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CUSTOM MERCH!
https://shop.spreadshirt.com/themillennialgardener

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SUBSCRIBE TO MY 2ND CHANNEL!
https://www.youtube.com/c/2MinuteGardenTips

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SOCIAL MEDIA
→ INSTAGRAM https://www.instagram.com/millennialgardener/
→ X (@NCGardening) https://x.com/NCGardening

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ABOUT MY GARDEN
Location: Southeastern NC, Brunswick County (Wilmington area)
Zone 8B, 34.1°N Latitude

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*As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.
© The Millennial Gardener

#gardening #garden #gardeningtips #vegetablegardening #vegetablegarden

What’s going on, gardeners? Today’s video is a bittersweet one because it is my last garden tour. So, hold on to your hats because I have a lot to show and we have a lot to discuss. If you’re new to the channel, please subscribe, hit the bell for notifications, and check out my Amazon store and Spreadshop links in the video description for everything I use in my garden and awesome custom apparel and gear. Well, it was 38 degrees this morning, and while we haven’t gotten a frost just yet, the end of the garden is imminent. All of the cold weather has taken its toll and a lot of the tropical vegetables are really starting to die back even though we haven’t yet got that frost. So today I’m going to go through the garden. I’m going to give my final tour for the year and try to pick anything I can that I can use right away. Now it doesn’t look like we’re going to get a frost for at least 2 weeks. So I’m not going to take every single thing that is frost sensitive because then that’ll just be too much and I won’t be able to use it efficiently. So, I’m going to take what I can use right away and store without overdoing it so I don’t be unnecessarily wasteful. 2025 has in many ways been both the best and worst gardening year of my life. On a personal note, I feel like it’s the best it’s ever been in the sense that I have grown as a person, I think more than I ever have before. I feel like I have a better grasp on the future than ever before. I have really gotten my climate here figured out. I’m really happy with where I am in life. I’ve secured some land for a future homestead and I’m just overall happy with my personal growth and development. But my garden, this is some of the worst it has ever looked this late into the season. In fact, my garden in general just hasn’t been very good-looking this year. And that’s because my garden is in a transition process where I built it eight years ago and the initial design has just kind of run its course. The uh initial beds are too shallow. The soil needs refreshing. The weed matting that I put down is beaten up from almost a decade worth of foot traffic. And the garden just needs to be rehabilitated. So, I spent last spring rebuilding my beds, making them taller, importing new soil, and it’s just taken so much of my time that everything else has fallen by the wayside. I wasn’t able to plant everything that I usually plant. I wasn’t able to fertilize as aggressively. My watering schedule was all messed up because I’m still working a full-time job while I do all of this stuff. I just didn’t have the time to do all the things that I wanted to do. As a result, a lot of my garden has been neglected, especially my container garden, and I’m just not happy with the way things look. But still, I am happy to say that I’ve had quite a good harvest. And what I’ve found is the best way to maximize your efficiency in your harvest is to plain and simple, plant a whole lot more than you need. Because even if you’re not a great gardener, if you plant double what you’re actually going to use, even if you have a terrible year and half your crops die, you’re going to have everything that you need. So, I’m happy to say that even though I wasn’t able to stay on top of things the way I usually do, because of everything that’s gone on in my life over the last year or two, well, I was still able to have a lot of success because I overplanted so much it made up for a lot of my own inadequacies. But that being said, I have this level of concern that I have never felt before in my life. And I think a lot of you probably feel the same way. And I think that you all as part of the gardening community may be some of the only people capable of understanding my level of concern and why at least I think things are the way they are. I just got back from a 10-day trip to Italy. We took a family vacation to parts of Italy that we believe that most of our family was from. And it was my first time ever in Europe. Now, I’ve been out of the country before many times, but I’ve never actually gone to Europe. And what struck me about Italy was how different the lifestyle was than here in the US. I knew that it would be a much different lifestyle, but what really blew my mind was how much cheaper food was. Food there was literally half the cost of it is here in the United States. You could get a package of steaks for less than €3. The milk was cheap. The cheese was half the price of here. You could get huge fresh bags of pasta for a dollar. You could get a bottle of red wine for $19 there. It was unbelievable how much more affordable it was to buy food. And I know wages are lower there and that’s part of the reason why, but it’s more than that. Now, because we were going away for a week and a half, I didn’t do much grocery shopping for a couple of weeks leading up to the trip because I wanted to use all the perishable food that we had up in the house first. So, when I got home the next day, I went to Costco. And what did I find? Well, I found that they raised their prices on those big Cryovac ribe eyes that they had there. The prices of ribe eyes there were up to $18.99 a pound. A month ago or 6 weeks ago, I think they were $14.99 a pound. They went up $4 a pound, which they were really expensive at $14.99 a pound. Now, one of those ribeye loins, they they cost almost $300. who is spending $300 on a rib roast? If if you are, please let me know in the comments below. But outside of influencers on YouTube buying them to show you how to cut cheap steaks for clicks that are twice as expensive as regular grocery stores, not cheap at all. Uh let me know because I really want to understand who’s actually buying uh this beef at these prices. And the other thing that really struck me was well today is November 1st so that means open enrollment. So when I logged into the healthcare website to do my questionnaire I found out that if I wanted to keep the same plan that me and my wife has now it would cost another $450 a month compared to what we enrolled in last year. Beef $19 a pound. Healthcare costs going up $450 a month. All of these costs are just getting absolutely insane. And I don’t know how the average person is expected to be able to carry on at these rates. And of course, the knee-jerk reaction generally is to get political. It’s the other side’s fault. They’re doing it to us. Or to blame businesses. Oh, they just want more and more money. But I don’t think that’s the case because businesses have been trying to increase their bottom line and politicians have been trying to seize more power since the days of King Arthur and before. This is nothing new. What changed so suddenly that all of a sudden everything’s been thrown into a tail spin? And while of course you can always say, well, there’s corruption here, there’s corruption there. Again, there’s always been corruption. There will always be corruption. The thing that has changed the most, I think, is ourselves and the way that we choose to live our lives. It’s not the politicians to blame. It is not the businesses to blame because politics and business and markets in general are always downstream of culture. We the people set the culture and they react to the culture that we set. And the fact of the matter is I think the reason why everything has changed so suddenly is because we the people have suddenly demanded something different and everybody simply reacted accordingly. I think the number one problem driving everything is simply our change in culture. We changed and we demanded these changes throughout the system. We decided that in the span of two to three generations, we were going to flip from a primarily produc a production culture to a consumption culture. And we decided we didn’t want to work as hard. We wanted to have more free time to sit around and watch TV, go to baseball games, things like that. And we wanted everybody else to outsource our food production and everything else that we used to do. For example, our greatgrandparents, every single person had some sort of food storage. They all canned food. They all saved food. Almost all of them had some sort of vegetable garden. Sure, maybe they weren’t able to grow 100% of everything they ate, but they were able to produce something. And because they produced something, they were able to go to companies and say, “Why should I buy these things from you? I can make I can grow better quality things and make better food at home for almost no money. Why should I get it from you? So they had all of the power. And the only way these companies could make an argument for why you should buy from them is if they say, “Well, we can do it faster and cheaper.” And that is what food production was in the beginning. It took weight off the people. It was less chores that we had to do. and companies could do things at scale, at production, so they could make it cheaper than you could at home. So the system worked for a long period of time. And for a long period of time, the grocery store model was awesome because it freed up all sorts of time from people and it allowed them to be able to get massive amounts of food cheaply and easily. So people actually saved time and money. So it was good in the short term. But then something happened over the course of 1 to two generations. It became a way to save time and money into a necessity because people forgot how to grow food and they started relying completely on these grocery store systems. So in the beginning the grocery stores and the food industry in general were the ones that had to innovate. They had to find ways to entice you to part with your money because you had the skills and the means to do without them. So they had to develop these efficient systems to produce food in a quality way and cheaply enough that it incentivized you to part with your money instead of doing it yourself. But things have since changed. Now these systems are not luxuries. They’re not trying to get you to part with your money. Now they are a necessity because nobody does this stuff anymore. Nobody has any food security at home. you have to go to them or else you don’t get any food. So because of that, they now hold all of the power. And for the record, I don’t think this is some kind of malicious development where companies are just trying to rip people off left and right, at least all the time. I think this is just a natural progression from small business to big business because when this was a small chunk of the market, you the companies were incentivized to run as lean and mean as and efficient as possible to maximize your value. And now they don’t have to do that anymore. Now it’s a massive sector of the economy. So they’re not incentivized to run lean and mean anymore. they are incentivized to create as many long-term career positions as possible. So that adds tons of bloat. That adds tons of expenses and that drives up the cost of everything. So as a result now, every time you buy something from the grocery store, think of all of the hands it touches. It starts with the farmer, then it starts with the trucking company that trucks from the farm to the distribution center. And then at the distribution center, everything is packed and then it’s shipped out to the local individual grocery stores where it’s then unloaded again onto shelves. You then buy it and you take it to the cashier. And every single time it touches hands, well, it’s demanding another full-time salary on top of that. So, you just have these costs compounding on top of each other because there are more and more middlemen that touch everything. And that is why food is so expensive now with this model. And this business model wasn’t by accident. It didn’t just spring up randomly. It it happened this way because this is what we demanded of the model. It used to be the way people ate was they would store their beans. They would store rice. They would store whatever harvest they got from their garden by canning tomatoes, pickling things. They’d be shelf stable over the winter. Then they would go to their local farm to pick some some crops that were in season to clean up the edges and bolster their food storage. And then they would buy things like half a cow and half a pig and they would store it and they would simply eat off whatever they had. But we decided as a society, no, no, no. I don’t want to just eat whatever meat cuts are left over in the freezer. I don’t want to eat whatever produce or beans that I have on hand. I don’t want to eat dried food. I want what I want right now. I want to be able to go to the grocery store. I want to be able to buy the exact cut of meat that I want right now for dinner fresh. I don’t want to store all this stuff. I don’t want to have a garage freezer. I don’t want to have a basement freezer. I want what I want in season and I want it now. And that imploded the entire business model. What am I going to do with these Trinidad scorpion peppers right here? They are literally too hot to eat. Well, anyway, our grandparents and great-grandparents, they mostly purchased their food from what I would like to call a decentralized business model, meaning they bought everything from a local community and those prices were basically disconnected from the grand scheme of things. They didn’t necessarily translate to what the prices were a state or two over. But when we decided that we wanted to buy everything now, we didn’t want to have to buy from the general store, from local farmers. We wanted what we want when we want it. Well, now you have to consolidate into a fewer number of much larger distribution centers because could you imagine if an Acme or a Harris ter or a Kroger if they had to source all of their meat and produce from a different farm at every single town. It would be logistically impossible to do that. So it forced all of these distribution centers and farms to basically gobble each other up in order to centralize where food was coming from. That way a smaller number of distribution centers could feed all of these different supermarket chains and give them what they needed from a logistical perspective. So what happens when you go from a decentralized system to a centralized system? Well, now everything is connected. So when food prices increase in Illinois, they also increase in Florida and Kansas and Texas and California because we’re all taking from the same pot. These prices aren’t they’re not disconnected anymore. They’re not isolated to the conditions of a community. When something bad happens, we all feel the pinch. Possums have absolutely decimated my pimmen harvest this year. They took it the whole time I was away in Italy. I think they scavenged 2/3 to 3/4 of my tree. H so unfortunate. And it was already a weak year for the pimmons. But uh anyway, back to my original point. If everybody wants a ribeye steak, well, there’s only 6 to 10 ribeye steaks on a cow. So, if everybody wants a ribeye, how do you make a system where everybody can get a ribeye whenever they want it? Well, you have to consolidate where all the meat is being processed. And I think I recently read that here in the United States, four processing companies are responsible for processing 85% of the grain-fed beef in this country. So when four companies are essentially controlling the price of your beef, that explains why all of your beef is so expensive because there’s no more competition left in the market. You see, a lot of people think that a monopoly means control of one and technically it does in the sense of mono, you know, using the Latin derivative. But the truth is in business a quadopoly is the same as a monopoly because it just leads to collusion in the system. And when people think of collusion they usually think of men in suits in smoke fil rooms making back backroom deals where they come together and they say we’re going to make this price this. You make this price this. And of course that’s not how it actually works in the real world. Number one that would be highly risky and illegal. They would get in all kinds of trouble if a meeting like that was ever recorded. But they don’t have to do that when there are four companies that basically do everything because prices are transparent. When you have hundreds of individual small companies competing against each other, it’s impossible to keep tabs on everybody. So, there’s competition in the marketplace. You can’t fix prices. But when there’s only four companies, well, you know how much it costs for everything to be made because every company is the same size and they just take a quarter of the distribution of the country. So, they naturally fix their prices because they each have equal market share and that’s just what it costs. So, when one company raises their price a dollar, the other companies are going to follow suit in kind. So, there’s no competition left in the marketplace. Four companies is still a monopoly. I mean, I remember when I was in high school and they were going through the cell phone wars. They were building out all the cellular networks and there was AT&T and Singular and Verizon and Sprint and T-Mobile and Altel and Nexttel and US Cellular and a bunch of other companies and everybody was fighting and all the prices were different. There were always always these rape promotions and nights and weekends start early with this company and you get a free phone and you get a free phone and Oprah comes and gives you a car and a brownie kit and all was well with the universe until they all consolidated and now there’s three companies and they all cost the same. This isn’t because of some evil government or corporate grand conspiracy. No, this is the system that we asked for. The system that we begged for. We didn’t want to live like our greatgrandparents where we stored our food and we lived within our means and we saved for a rainy day. We decided we wanted everything right now when we wanted it at that exact moment. And we are so lazy these days, we won’t even go to a restaurant and sit down and eat at the restaurant because it’s too much effort to get in a car and drive there. No, we want takeout that we won’t even go to pickup anymore. We want people to deliver our food for us, which by the way adds even more overhead and cost, driving up the cost of goods and services even more. And I understand that those are important jobs to people that have them as well. But the fact of the matter is we’re not gaining jobs in the system that we have because we’re allergic to innovation. We’re trying to protect this system at any and all costs. And when you protect a market and you don’t let it evolve, what happens? Well, it consolidates. Businesses naturally merge and consolidate and get larger and larger and larger. So, if we’re going to protect the system and we’re not going to allow for innovation and for people to come up with a new way to do things and create a new market from scratch, then don’t be surprised when there is only one player left in the market and we are all beholden to them. And what does this have to do with health care costs and how much everything has gone up? Well, everything. I mean, all you have to do is just look back at the Brady Bunch, which by the way started in 1969. It wasn’t that long ago. It it was less than 60 years ago. They had a doortodoor doctor. Remember, the doctor would come over to the house with that little bag. It happened to be that most doctors were businessmen. They got their degree, they got their license, and they went doortodoor or they opened up their own small practice. I remember growing up in the ‘9s, there was a doctor’s office on every corner. There were so many of them. And as a result, there was no line. If you needed an appointment, you called, you got one within that week. None of this 3 to four month business. Doctors largely didn’t work for big health care networks. But we decided that we wanted to go to a one-stop shop. We wanted to streamline things, make everything easy where one or two places takes care of all of our needs. Well, guess what that did? We traded convenience for competition and quality because when companies don’t have to compete anymore, well, how great is the customer service at the electric company? But of course, the biggest cost contributor of all are our lifestyle choices. It’s because of how we changed our lives over the last two to three generations. Could you imagine what would happen to the rates of heart disease and cancer and obesity and type 2 diabetes if we abandoned our modern diet of fast food and takeout and deep fried appetizers and we went back to eating pretty much nothing but local meats and dairy from our local farmers and vegetables that we grew ourselves or bought from the farmer down the road. I mean there would be a radical transformation in our overall health just from the amount of weight that we would lose as a nation. I mean this is the stuff that largely keeps me in shape just doing this going around the yard and garden harvesting, enjoying the sun, doing a little bit of pruning. H it’s such mental and physical therapy and it it keeps me on the smaller side and the healthier side. In fact, I just got sick on the airplane back from Italy because I was surrounded by three sick people for 10 hours. And this is the first time I’ve been sick in 10 years. I’ve never been sick since I moved to North Carolina in 2017. And it’s 2025. So, you know, there’s a first time for everything, but I’m glad I could share it with you all. So, how do we fight back against all of this? Well, we need to stop empowering a system that requires us to be completely dependent on it to be successful. We need to do little things along the way so we can take the power back and we can make it so the system has to innovate once again and change because it needs us more than we need it. And that starts by simply growing some of your own food. You don’t have to grow everything you need. Just grow some of the things that you need. And please commit to actually eating your harvests. I know it’s crazy to say, but it’s shocking how many people grow things in a garden and they actually don’t eat their harvest. they give it away or they let it rot. Commit to eating what you grow before you go out to a store and buy more similar produce. Eat seasonally. Not only will you find that the food tastes better and you’ll save a ton of money, but I really think there’s some health benefits to the seasonal eating patterns. I’m going to take all this beautiful food that I just harvested. All these tomatoes I’m going to leave out in my very cool garage to slowly ripen and I’ll use them as they turn red. You’ll see they’re in all different stages. So I’ll be able to use them as they get ripe. The pcimmens I’m going to put them in my fridge to to soften up. I’ll turn these into pcmen jam. This butternut squash. This will store for months. And then over here I have mostly peppers. I’m going to turn these into pickled peppers with the fresh dill that I just made. I showed you how to make pickled peppers a couple of weeks ago. I’m going to follow that same recipe. And as for the super hot peppers, I’m going to put these in a food dehydrator and I’m going to turn this into either super hot chili flakes or I’m going to make some spicy garlic chili oil. And as for the Roma, there’s going to be a lot of salads in our future because it’s starting to look delicious. But the real secret weapon is this. When I was in Costco, they had these boneless pork shoulders that were marked down 25% off. I got this huge boneless pork shoulder that I’ve been slowly smoking for six or seven hours. And I’m going to use this as allpurpose meat for Britney and I for the entire week. So for the cost of $20 total, Britney and I literally have dinner for the next four nights easily. So when you break the cost down, we’re literally eating for less than $3 a day per person. And we’re eating very high quality food. So I use this all-purpose meat for things. will make tacos one night, another night it’ll be over salad. Maybe one night I’ll turn it into a pasta of some sort. You’re really only limited to your imagination. And those are some easy ways that we can take our power back and exercise more control over our own food supply and ensure that we are eating the healthiest food possible. For most of us, it’ll be buying bulk meat at the grocery store when it’s on special like I just showed you. But my ultimate goal is to clean out this mess of a garage hopefully this winter when I have more free time and I finish building back out my garden. I want to completely remove this shelving right here, move everything into my shed, and then I want to get a small garage freezer here. And the ultimate goal would be to buy a quarter cow or a half a cow and store the meat in there and support local farmers. I’ll still have to go to the grocery store for some meats and things as I need them, but the ultimate goal is to be able to eat most nights out of the freezer by eating local, responsibly raised, grass-fed beef. And that right there is my final garden tour of the 2025 growing season and my thoughts on a lot of different things and what’s been happening now. Maybe there were a lot more thoughts than you bargained for, but if you made it through this whole video, I just want to say my goal with this video is not to be preachy. I’m not trying to blame anybody. I don’t think it’s anybody’s specific fault. I think it is just collectively the choices that we have all chosen to make and they’re such robotic decisions now we don’t even know that we are making them. But they are what is affecting us and our lifestyle and the cost and the available of all things. So my goal with this video is to basically try and use myself as an example. a guy that lived in a city for 13 years. Still tried to grow what I could on decks and driveways in that city, came out to a basic suburb and tried to do the best that I can with my land as a fairly self-sufficient but ultimately young and relatively naive person. So, I like to tell people that if I can do all this not really knowing all that much about the world and not really knowing any more skills than anybody else and working a full-time job, I think you can too. So, I just want to let you know what is possible and that you don’t have to be a slave to the system. You don’t have to feel like you have to buy every single little thing. You can take control of your life and you can do little things over a long period of time that will not only positively affect your health and your wallet, but just overall help you grow as a person. At least it has for me. And for those of you that are thinking, I’d love to do what you’re doing, but it’s just way too expensive. Please, you cannot look at this as an expense. Look at this like investing in your 401k. For example, most financial advisors will tell you that you should invest something like 15% of your total salary into your 401k to have a retirement similar to the standard of living that you’re used to. If I say that 15% in your 401k, none of you watching this video went, “Wow, 15% that’s expensive.” No, you wouldn’t use the word expensive. You may say, “That’s a lot.” But you would never consider putting money in your 401k as expensive. It’s a cost, but it’s not an expense. It’s an investment. Expenses and investments are two different things. You need to look at your garden like that, too. Yes, it can cost you a good bit upfront to build your garden beds, truck in your soil, get some fertilizer, set up some irrigation, get insect netting or shade cloth, buy the plants themselves or seed trays, nursery containers. All those things do cost money, but they are not an expense. They are an investment. And over the years, it it did cost several thousand dollars in the beginning to build and set all of this up. But now, I only spend a couple hundred every single year because I pretty much have everything I need. And I get thousands and thousands of dollars in free pro free produce out of the deal. And I can’t even tell you how many tens of thousands of dollars I probably have saved on my health because I’m eating this stuff instead of junk from restaurants or takeout or a grocery store. So yeah, you’ll spend a few thousand dollars, but you’re investing it and over time the interest will compound and you should save tens of thousands in the long run and probably be a happier, healthier person in the long run for it. So what did you think about this video? Do you agree or do you disagree with the things I said in the video? I mean, these are the things that I think I’ve learned over the years, but I would love to hear your feedback as well. If you’re doing certain things to help mitigate the high cost of everything these days, please let us know down in the video description. Let us know what has worked for you to cut costs while still eating very well. So, everybody, I sure hope you did find this video interesting. If you did, please make sure to hit the like button, subscribe to the channel, and please ring the notification bell so you’re notified when I release more videos like these. If you’re curious about any of the products that I use in my yard and garden and to save money or store food, I’ll place direct links to my favorite items down in the video description. But for everything I use in real life, they are all linked in my Amazon storefront. So expand the video description, click on the Amazon storefront link, you’ll see everything I use in real life. And while you’re down there, please check out my website, the millennialger.com, for custom merch if you want to support my channel. Thank you all so much for watching, and I hope to see all of you again on the next video. What? Dale is leading me somewhere. Where are we going? What? You want to eat? Oh, he’s jumping the gun. That’s what he’s doing. You missed, dude. You missed. Oh, Da wants to walk. Okay, we’ll take Dale for a walk. Our custom Dale harness. Anything for this little stinker right here. Buddy, if you keep spinning around in circles, I’m not going to be able to harness you up. Let’s go for our walk.